wulfstan

Every system of authority carries with it the risk of abuse; but we still accept legitimate authorities carrying out breaches of personal privacy for the sake of law enforcement - the warrant system being the obvious one. That's part of the compromise we make in society.

Good governments ensure that a breach of personal privacy has to travel through a legitimate process with an independent judiciary to limit the risk.

Ok! That is a sensible rejoinder. Make a proof-of-work system that limits the authority from making more than n requests in a space of time. A good brake on abuse.

No, I don't accept that this is the case any more than the root certificate system is a golden key. I'm quite sure that Apple can issue me a certificate that allows me to build a custom version of iOS that can be flashed onto my phone; why doesn't the same thing apply to other things?

Yes, but if a court decides you have committed a crime, and law enforcement show sufficient cause to obtain a warrant, they can seize your secret and - if it's relevant - use it to show your state of mind when the crime was committed.

Well I get that a significant part of our lives is wrapped up in our phones nowadays, but I still try to preserve a safe haven between my ears...mostly...

Certificates expire right now. It's in the schema for how PKI works. Why can't the issued cert expire in the same way?

I don't accept that. We have "master keys" for some forms of encryption right now in the form of root certificates; knowing that root cert authorities could issue certificates that might allow people to sniff my network traffic doesn't keep me awake at night.

Yes, I am arguing for is requiring OEMs to implement this mechanism.

Frankly, if the NSA wanted to have Apple build a custom iOS version for a criminal so they could sniff his network traffic and flash content from the comfort of Maryland I don't believe that would be impossible today.

Playing devil's advocate here...

What is wrong with:

* an expiring certificate

* issued by the device manufacturer or application creator

* to law enforcement

* once a competent court of law has given approval

* that would allow a specific user's content to be decrypted prior to expiry

There are a million gradations of privacy from "completely open" to "e2e encrypted". Governments (good ones!) are rightly complaining that criminals are using encryption to commit particularly awful crimes. Politicians are (mistakenly) asking for a master key - but what I feel we should as a community support is some fine-grained legal process that would allow limited access to user information if justified by a warrant.

Competent jurisdictions allow this for physical search and seizure. It's not unreasonable to ask for the same thing to apply to digital data.

Yes. I used these features in Preview several times today. You have made my life easier on many occasions. For that, sir, I salute you.

May you enjoy your retirement tinkering in your software garden.

Yep someone's going to be getting a little chat with the cops for getting handsy. And at 7am for goodness sakes!

You can also just turn it off globally by turning off the "Intolerance" setting on the Bluesky Moderation account - visit @moderation.bsky.app and set it up how you want.